Caleb Braun

Separation Preparations in the Country

Who’s there? Knock-knock. There’s someone

catwalking toward the edge of listening. Not

the someone you wanted, and even

that someone is not the someone

you wanted. You want all the hints

to become Xs, to see the inside

of the cereal box. But it’s exactly this division

that sustains despair. Sometimes

they are windows, sometimes mirrors,

an occasional trapdoor. Then down you fall

into cotton softly where there had been wood,

a sneeze marks time’s vast ambulation.           

You had opened the door like a drawer

in which rested, like bunked soldiers, the words

you could live by. Even if you could

retrieve them now, they’d merely be

features of the weather. They’d fall

like rain, like snow (it really matters

that amount), like ash, and you could choose

then to stay “indoors,” as they say, watching

them drawl or to go out under them and be covered

by their iterations. Our phones were at walks

with us then, and each parting temporarily stalled,

coming back eventually only in the joy of the night

to ignite us into a new light on the look

of distant barns, the red rooftops of neighbors, the ochre

globes of long awaited, almost harvestable wheat.